Collaborating with Industry to Address Obesity Is a Mistake, Says Kelly Brownell

Yale University Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity’s Kelly Brownell has provided a “Perspective” article for PLoS Medicine’s ongoing series about “Big Food.” Titled “Thinking Forward: The Quicksand of Appeasing the Food Industry,” the July 3, 2012, article contends that public-health efforts to collaborate with the food industry to address obesity are a mistake. According to Brownell, “The food industry has had plenty of time to prove itself trustworthy,” but because food companies “must sell less food if the population is to lose weight, . . . this pits the fundamental purpose of the food industry against public health goals.” Brownell calls for the industry to be regulated. “Left to regulate itself, industry has the opportunity, if not the mandate from shareholders, to sell more products irrespective of their impact on consumers. Government, foundations and other powerful institutions should be working for regulation, not collaboration.”

Another article in the series, “‘Big Food,’ the Consumer Food Environment, Health, and the Policy Response in South Africa,” claims that large, multinational food and beverage companies have a commanding presence in the market and are “implicated in unhealthy eating.” The authors, with several institutions that include the Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University, note among other matters that McDonald’s has made significant market progress in South Africa, setting a record by opening 30 restaurants in just 23 months. The article explores how the industry has made its processed products more widely available, affordable and acceptable in the country and suggests that the government “develop a plan to make healthy foods such as fruit, vegetables, and whole grain cereals more available, affordable, and acceptable, and non-essential, high-calorie, nutrient-poor products, including soft drinks, some packaged foods and snacks, less available, more costly, and less appealing to the South African population.” The authors recommend starting with the regulation of promotional activities and “imposing taxes on unhealthy food products.”

An article providing the perspective from Brazil claims that traditional food
systems and dietary patterns have also been displaced in this country “by
ultra-processed products made by transnational food corporations” and
links increasing incidences of obesity and major chronic diseases with this
phenomenon. Titled, “The Impact of Transnational ‘Big Food’ Companies
on the South: A View from Brazil,” the article observes that while “intense
pressures, which include ubiquitous television and internet propaganda
designed to turn eating and drinking into constant individual snacking,” are
threatening congregate eating practices, “food and drink consumption is not
yet dislocated and isolated from family and social life in Brazil. This is probably
the most important factor protecting national and regional traditional food systems,” including minimally processed foods prepared and eaten by the
family at home.

Still, the Brazilian market has purportedly been saturated at least since the
1970s with “ultra-processed products,” and obesity rates, while comparatively
low at 14 percent of adults in 2009, have increased as consumption of these
products has increased from 20 percent of calories in the 1980s to 28 percent
currently.

Recognizing that traditional food systems that, in some respects, are responsible for undernutrition in the country and could be improved, the authors call for government to adopt policies that protect traditional dietary patterns by supporting cooperatives and family farmers, protecting and stabilizing the prices of healthy staple foods and making minimally processed foods more affordable and available. They also recommend that government “reduce the volume of salt and sugar entering food supplies” and adopt information and education programs at national and state levels “to reinforce this legislation.” They further advocate for a worldwide prohibition on “the hydrogenation process that generates industrial saturated fats and trans fats.